Category: Personal

After spending the past sveral weeks trying to decide what laptop to buy, hunting around for a good deal, and then trying to bring myself to actually spend the money, I went ahead tonight and ordered a new Dell Inspiron laptop for school.

it’s a good thing that I have a hard time spending money on myself. Dell has a habit of changing their prices every week, and by waiting two weeks I cut about $50 off the final price of the system, plus got a bit better bang for my buck by way of a slightly larger screen.

Here’s the configuration I ordered:

Dell Inspiron 1150
Intel Pentium 4 Processor 2.80GHz
15-in XGA screem
Windows XP Pro
512 Mb RAM
40GB HD
8x DVD-ROM
Built-in wifi, modem, and network cards
Extended cell battery
1 year warranty

And all for under $1,000.

Given the limited budget I had to work with, I think I got pretty good bang for my buck. The tradeoff I’ll be making is this laptop is no lightweight; it will weigh in at close to 8 pounds. Still, I’m pretty psyched.

Over the past few days I’ve been mentally composing bits of a typical “the year that was” look back on Scott’s and my past year. The usual thing – mention a few personal highlights and low notes, maybe make a few political comments, and close with something upbeat about the coming year. But frankly I just don’t feel enthusiastic about pulling it together into a full blog post. It’s not the worst year we’ve been through, but it was far from the year I hoped it would be. And I’ve already blogged most of the major high and low notes anyway.

2005 will bring a real change – I start my MBA program at USF in the 3rd week of January. It’s been more than 15 years since I was last a full-time student, and as the day gets nearer I find that I am more than a little nervous about the whole thing.

I’m not such a mature adult that I don’t still have the same kinds of anxieties I had those many years ago when I last started at a new school — Will I do well? Will people like me? What should I major in? And there are new anxieties I didn’t have back in my college days — Have I made the right decision? Can we really afford for me to be more or less non-income producing for so long? Will I be able to get a better career out of this endeavor, even at my age?

I’m better able to handle anxiety now that I used to be — I’ve had a lot of practice at it — but these are the things that occupy my mind as 2004 rolls to a close. What 2005 will bring I don’t know. I’m eager to find out, though.

Today is Scott’s and my 8th wedding anniversary. We exchanged cards and cooked up some nice steaks for dinner, but don’t really have the time or money to do much else to note the occasion. Hopefully by the time our 10th anniversary rolls around we’ll be in a position to celebrate in higher style — like maybe a vacation.

What matters most, though, is that we’re still together and happy. The rest is icing on the cake.

I spent 9 hours dealing with a shorthanded staff and a lot of short-tempered customers today. It’s not the first Xmas Eve I’ve worked but it was definitely the toughest. The line was practially out the door all day and holiday spirit was in very short supply.

I’m home now and looking forward to a day off. Then I wade back into the breech on Dec 26th. At least I have a fat paycheck coming my way for all the extra hours I’m putting in this pay period.

I’m way too tired to be merry. And even though this is not my holiday, I miss my family. I miss snow (not that NYC had a white Xmas all that often but at least there was a chance). And I miss New York.

On the bright side, I have Scott & the kitties all happy to have me home, and tomorrow we’re going to cook up some kickass food with some friends. Should be fun.

Fortune’s wheel is not without a sense of timing. On checking the mail on our way back from the SF SPCA’s clinic yesterday, I found my acceptance letter from USF. I’ll be starting my MBA program in about 6 weeks.